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This month I've spent a few hours (free) writing a program for a cancer
researcher so that he can automate access to genome database's otherwise
intractable interface, so that he can spend his time on actual cancer research
instead of spending a week or two or twelve mindlessly copying and pasting
to and from Netscape. The program I wrote for him uses general-purpose
tools that Gisle, Martijn,
and me have been working on for years. Remember that the next time someone
you know gets cancer and doesn't die of it.

The problem with toolsmithing is that as you solve metaproblems, it's
easy to forget that that translates directly into making people happier --
people you probably will never even know.

And for almost a decade now, I've been involved with writing software
for people that work on documenting endangered languages, so that they
can than produce dictionaries almost twice as fast, and at a fraction
of the cost, and with inestimable gains in the quality of the finished
product. Moreover, the data will be in formats that will be sanely tractable,
and not some ghastly .DOC stew.

Thought for the day: I bet the guy who wrote
CDEX [n3.net] doesn't know that
I use it to make .wav/.ogg/.mp3 files of our interviews in Native languages,
nor does he know that because his software is free, that means that our
grant budget is free to buy that many more blank CDs, pay the Natives for
that many more hours of their time, and so on.

YOW! Am I privileged yet!?

BTW, code is nice, but sometimes it takes money to get things done. I keep meaning to get around to fixing the whole current mess with the various Pod parsers/renderers, and I think I'll finally find some time soon. But frankly, if people had waved some money at me to do it, it'd have been done a whole lot sooner.